The demand for business continuity, disaster recovery, and remote operating capabilities continue to increase in the marketplace. Compounding the difficulty in meeting this demand is the fact that some enterprises have global operations that require backup or replication services and data access capabilities that can extend over thousands of miles to and from geographically dispersed datacenters. Recent developments in networking technologies, including, e.g., wide area networks (WANs), have enabled longer distance connectivity.
For example, FC-SB4 also commonly referred to as FICON (Fiber Connectivity) is a Fibre Channel (FC) layer 4 protocol used to communicate with mainframe peripheral devices such as disk drives and the like. FICON is used extensively in replicating and mirroring data stored on disk drives that are associated with mainframes. One issue with FICON is its inability to operate over long distances. In fact, native FICON may operate only at distances on the order of up to 100 kilometers at full data rates. As a result, FICON, on its own, is not suitable for long haul backup systems. On the other hand, FICON is, in many cases, the de facto standard for communication within a mainframe computing environment. That is, backup, replication and data access approaches that leverage FICON are “tried and true” and many administrators and information technology (IT) professionals have relied on FICON-based functionality for many years. In light of the foregoing, improvements in long distance data operations, especially in connection with mainframe computing operations, are desired.